As I mentioned a few posts ago in Non-News Good News, submitting your work to publishers is a bitc— I mean, a lengthy and time consuming process filled with woe.

Take, for example, my short story My Body’s Rorschach.

Seriously. Take it. You can! It’s been published in the fine literary journal, Pilot!

Yesterday I was out for a walk with my friends Sam and Tina, and we wandering into Atlantic News so they could buy lottery tickets. I swung by the writing section of the magazine stands (why is it always hidden away on the bottom shelf?), and there it was! Issue 9! With my name listed as a contributor!

Yes, I’m excited. It’s delightful to see your name in print. But getting this one story published was a long journey. And since I love lists so much, I thought I would put together a simple time line for your enjoyment.

Spring 2002 — I first wrote the story under the title A Few Weeks In The Summer. Yes, that was a horrible title. Yes, I am terrible at coming up with titles.

November 2004 — I first submitted the story to a literary journal for publication. It was rejected.

August 2005 — I submitted it for the second time. Also rejected.

2006 — 2007 — I was working on other things. The story was all but forgotten about.

2008 — I stumbled across the story and reread it, expecting to hate it. It was messy, but there were some parts I still really liked. So I reworked it, came up with a (marginally) better name, and starting to submit it more regularly.

April 5, 2011 — I submitted My Body’s Rorschach to Pilot Project. They were the 12th publisher to get it.

August 12, 2011 — I received an email from the Pilot Project editor accepting the story for publication. Woo Hoo!

Fall 2011 — My editor and I went back and forth 5 or 6 times on some changes they wanted me to make. Yes, even when something is accepted to be published, it still isn’t finished!

February 2012 — Six months after it was first accepted, and ten years after it was first writing, My Body’s Rorschach (along with several other stories) is sitting on shelves of a handful of book stores across Canada.

A stack a other stories, including a novel and a screenplay, are going through the same process. It is possible that nothing else will ever see the light of day again. And this, dear friends, is why I have two other day jobs.

I do apologize for my absence. It’s not like I haven’t been thinking about you. It’s just…how shall I put this…ah, yes.

All of my ideas for blog posts have been incredibly lame.

It’s true. Every time I sat down to write something, bad ideas flooded my head. I couldn’t move past them. Nothing remotely interesting came to mind.

I see three explanations for this phemonenom.

1) I’ve become an incredibly boring person.

2) I’ve always was an incredibly boring person, and am only now coming to terms with it.

3) All of these little, stupid things are trapped in my head, blocking the good ideas.

Let’s test #3 before we turn to #2 or #1 as viable options. I’ll flush all of the bad ideas out with one quick post. Then we wait for all the good stuff to come flooding back.

I apologize for inflicting this on you, and understand completely if you’ve already stopped reading and have switched back to LOL Cats.

Top Seven Things That Really Aren’t Interesting Enough To Blog About

1) I made tea a while ago in my favourite mug. My step dad bought it for me when I was 18 and had moved out of the family home. I poured hot water into it and the cup split right in half.

2) We inherited (I swear we didn’t actually spend money on this) a package of Mug Cakes. You put the powder in a mug, add water, and microwave. The package promised a delicious cake in a mug. What we got was salty, powdery sludge-in-a-mug.

3) I made my boyfriend a sweater for Christmas. Part way in I had to pull out about half of it because I made a stupid mistake. (Note: I will likely post more about this sweater. I happen to think knitting stories are wildly interesting.)

4) I found a recipe mistake in a Jamie Oliver cookbook. For a few moments I felt this elated superiority.

5) We unpacked a box of Christmas decorations donated to us by family, I thought all of the broken ones put together looked really pretty.

6) I made Lemoncillo (gin, lemon zest, sugar). It looked sticky in it’s jar, but tastes really good on icecream.

I started doing this thing. Many years ago I started writing down every book I read. This was driven by:

My passionate love of lists.

A belief that a really long list of books I had some relation to would make me look cool.

A (relatively reasonable) fear that over time I would forget what I’d read (reasonable considering how many times we’ll get to the end of a movie and Mom will say “You know, I think I saw that before…”). This was coupled with the belief that if I can’t remember reading a book at least I could know that I had read it, and this would somehow make me feel better. Now, having seen dementia (only a little, only from the sidelines. And no, Mom, no, Granny, I’m not talking about you!) I’m starting to think being reminded of the things you can’t remember is probably worse and I should let these to-be-forgotten books go. But I can’t, because of point 1. And point 4.

I really super duper totally love lists.

The book I finished today, that prompted this whole debacle.

So, I started this list in 2001, when I was in college and feeling really smart. And I updated it faithfully for a few years. Then, in 2003, I stopped. I don’t know why. I was young. I was foolish. I was working my first real job. I was distracted by cocktails and cute boys.

I few years ago I came across the file on my computer. Scanning the list of books I’d read years ago filled my with joy. It was like being reacquainted with an old, dear friend. A friend who you’d totally forgotten about, because while they are a good person, you are selfish and self-absorbed and forgetful and kind of mean. But they don’t mind; they’re just happy to see you and be remembered. I guess this friend is pretty pathetic. Which is probably why you let them drift away in the first place.

I digress…

Right. So it was wonderful to go through this list and remember these books and sometimes remember where I was when I read them. But it also made be incredibly sad. There was this huge hole, years missing! I wanted to start the list again, but the anal retentive part of me (it’s a really big part) said NO! The list will be imperfect. Invalid. You can’t keep a tally of books only sometimes. That’s not a list of things you’ve read. It’s a list of things you’ve remembered to record. It’s a testament to how stupid and lazy you are!

So I doped this part of my brain with a few bottles of wine and started my list again.

This morning I finished My Sister’s Blue Eyes by Jacques Poulin. I sat down at my computer, coffee in hand, and opened up “The File”.

I hadn’t updated it since April!

What? WHAT? WHATWHATWHAT?!?!?

The first book I can remember reading all by myself

The baby in me wanted to bawl. Fortunately she was quickly quashed by the uppity jerk in me (Are you in physical pain? Is someone abusing you emotionally? Do you have food in your cupboards? Then BUCK UP!) and replaced by the geek in me. Project! Fun!

The project? To put the list on my blog! I know, this is the best thing you’ve heard all day. Am I right? I can reformat the whole thing! It’ll take hours! Weeee! And I could add a rating system and link to author pages and—

Four hours later, and this is what I have. http://sarahgignac.com/reading Not bad for a start, but the links to authors and such will take a while to add.

Does anyone else keep lists like this? Please, tell me I’m not alone!

And if you have any suggestions for reading material, I’m always on the look out for my next favourite author!

Remember that time I went back to BC for the holidays and I was all yeah, I’m going to write all the time. I’m going to update my blog so often that I’ll crash the internet. That’s how prolific I’m going to be!

Okay, maybe you didn’t know about my personal ambition of breaking the internet, but perhaps you knew that first bit about the visit to the west coast. Let’s take a look back at all the blog posts I managed to bang out over those five long weeks.

There’s one, and…hmm, that’s it. One.

Take that, internet. Buckle under the weight of my words!! MWAHAHAHAHA!

What is the opposite of prolific? The internet of which I mock suggests words like barren, fruitless, and impotent. Ouch.

I think I’ll take this slightly embarrassing lapse in productivity and turn it into a…

Drum roll please…

You guessed it, loyal reader. A “BEST OF” LIST! WOOT!

Best Activities of My West Coast Visit**

Batbouts, hot from the pan

Flooding my mom’s house. Because a visit home isn’t complete without causing some property damage.I decided to rinse the chlorine out of my bathing suit in the upstairs bathroom sink. I turned the hot water on, inserted the plug, and hey! What’s that shiny thing over here? lalala, hmhmhm, dododo… Some time later I wandered into the bathroom to discover a large, very hot lake where the linoleum floor used to be. I cleaned it up, thankful that no one would ever have to know about my extreme stupidity. A while later my mom came home and asked what all the water was doing in the downstairs hallway. It leaked through the floor/roof and caused a small indoor reservoir. Right beside her computer and all her office equipment. Heehee, oops!

Cooking Batbouts with my dad. We spent a day cooking a Moroccan dinner, including such delicacies as a fig and olive rabbit stew thing, spicy carrots, couscous, tabouleh, and batbouts. I don’t know how they’re supposed to be pronounced, but we were calling them “bat-boots”. Say it. Out loud. Now. It’s fun, no? As fun as they are to say, cooking them is even funner. They’re sort of like a pita. You slap the thin dough in a really hot pan and they balloon up like a wholewheat pillow.

Watching my parents try to set up a VCR. I remember when we first got a VCR. I was probably about nine. It went with our very first colour TV and it was awesome. We could rent Girls Just Wanna Have Fun and Overboard any time we wanted. Sweet!

Melissa and I wanted to relive part of our childhood by watching Gremlins, and the only copy we could find was a VHS. No problem, my mom said. I have a VCR in the cupboard. Hours later and there were cables and remotes and crumbly brown manuals all over the living room floor. We live in a culture of HDTV and PVR and cable boxes and blue ray and movies coming in through our gaming consoles and TV that you can pause. And there I was, brought back to the sweet age of nine, sitting on the couch watching both my parents hunched over in the dim lighting of the TV, trying to figure out how to hook up a gosh darn VCR.

They couldn’t do it.

Eating sushi. Oh, sushi, how I’ve missed thee. It’s not that it doesn’t exist in Halifax. But it’s not plentiful and therefore is freaking expensive. In Victoria it is good. And cheap.

I ate it.

A lot.

Secret Activity. My absolute favouritest thing I did while in BC was so utterly wonderful and fantastic that it deserves its own blog post. But be assured that it rocked. It is a combination of sweet and cute and awesome and funny and at times very, very loud.

Any guesses?

** This list doesn’t include things like visiting with my family and friends, which was lovely to do, but, and I mean absolutely no offence, sort of boring to write about. I mean, who wants to read and then I saw this person and it was fun, and then I saw this other person and it was also fun, and then I ate sausage cheese fondo with yet another person and guess what? It was fun! I sure don’t. And I was there.

It’s Wednesday afternoon, and you all know what that means. That’s right! It’s time for a random list!

Okay, so that’s not a thing. But it should be a thing. The Wednesday Afternoon List thing. Can I get a WOOT WOOT if you’re with me?

This week’s list is — drum roll, please…

How Halifax is Different than Victoria

When you move to a new place, it’s the little differences that can really mess with your head. Like when I lived in Germany and couldn’t find fresh milk anywhere. Or Whitehorse, where wine was $4 a bottle and vegetables came pre-bruised and mouldy.

These are some of the things about Halifax that are just plain strange.

Me & Sidney Crosby

1) Bus stops don’t have a red line on the curb. You actually have to look up and see if there’s a tiny little Bus-Stop sign on the telephone pole. And don’t get me started about the quality of both the transit service and their documentation (schedules, maps, etc). Forget about it! It’s almost enough for me to seek employment with the transit company, just so I can make it all better. I said almost.

2) Hockey. It doesn’t exist out here. When people go to pubs it’s to talk to friends. Not to get drunk and yell obscenities at flat screen TVs. How weird is that? Perhaps it has something to do with all the games starting near midnight, thanks to there being no teams in our time zone.

3) Despite the absence of hockey, Sidney Crosby is EVERYWHERE. Books. T-shirts. Posters. Cardboard cutouts in the vegetable section of the grocery store. It’s like he’s a local fella or something.

4) Tim Hortons dominates the coffee industry. Though Starbucks is starting to show its little green heads here and there. For those east coasters, please note that the opposite is true on the west coast. If you’re walking down the street and you happen to notice there isn’t a Starbucks in sight then you are most likely dreaming and can start to do cool dream stuff, like take off all your clothes and run around trying to fly while screaming I AM THE DARK KNIGHT!

5) 500ml containers of buttermilk are not available in the dairy section of respectable grocers.

6) Most respectable grocers have a liquor store in the same building. This = awesome. It totally makes up for the lack of conveniently sized buttermilk cartons.

7) Postal workers are crazily, insanely nice. Not that those in Victoria aren’t nice. They are the normal amount of nice one would want from someone working in a post office. The ones here are so over-the-top helpful and genuinely sweet that I leave feeling like I have a new BFF and should expect an invitation to meet their families any day.

8) People don’t give me a hard time for not working. Unlike some of my Victoria friends. Yes, DAVID, I’m talking about YOU.

9) Sushi is waaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyy too expensive.

10) At the majority of respectable dining establishments, coffee is included in the price of your breakfast. This is enough to make me want to live here forever.